Drought brings misery to Arkansas River basin

Piece Description

Drought has spread across a wide swath of the Country. But all along the Arkansas River drought has been torching crops, depressing tourism and threatening municipal water supplies for months. Our story, from Frank Morris reporting for Harvest Public Media, begins where the drought does, at the Arkansas’ headwaters, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and follows river to its demise on sunbaked Kansas prairie.

AMB WATER
STANDUP
The Arkansas River starts here, about 10 miles north of Leadville, as a trickle, running off some of the highest peaks in the continental United States.
GS ALL DOWN HILL
11-thusand-2, and it’s all down hill from here. (laughing)
Garry Hanks is Deputy Water Commissioner up here. He’s an affable, grey-haired fella, retired high school teacher, who is now in charge of a precious commodity.
GS SNOW CAPPED PEAKS
You would see snow-capped peaks, and water rushing down… “and this year it’s just kind of dribbling” Yeah! It’s not even dribbling, I can’t see any right now.
And the drought intensifies just downstream.

AMB bing, bong…
GS SHUT THIS GUY OFF
So, I’m going to take this pipe wrench, and I’m going to shut this guy off.

>>Hanks and I have come to a “head gate”, two big steel valves set in concrete at a bend in this picturesque, rocky trout stream. One’s already closed. Now, they both are, and a rancher downstream is out of luck.

He wasn’t getting very much to start with, now he’s not going to… get any.

Because every drop of water in this river is spoken for, and just downstream from here it’s used mainly for tourism, fishing, and rafting.

AMB WALL SLAMMER
Dig it in! digitin digitin digitin! Bump! SPLASH [[FADE]] Nice job!
>>Andy Neinas (Nie-nus) is guiding a rubber raft, full of tourists wearing orange helmets through Royal Gorge, where teh Arkansas has cut down through 1000 feet of pink granite. He runs Echo Canyon, a big outfitter.
that was wall smaller
AN BIG DEAL
Rafting is the summer time of skiing when you’re talking about Colorado.
Forward 2…

Rafting’s big business on the Arkansas, and business is down. Neinas blames the forest fires more than the water levels, but the river is low.
AN LITTLE SMALLER
So here we have, the South Canyon Ditch, and up ahead the Hydraulic Ditch, and essentially, the Arkansas River is just a little bit smaller, right now.
AMB WATER WHOOSH
AN PUSH
Wow! Forward hard! Forward hard! And I am probably going to have to get out and push. [[[FADE UNDER ]]]Forward hard, let’s keep going hard, hard.

>>All the water in river is allocated based on seniority. The older the water claim, the higher the priority. Canon City, at the mouth of Royal Gorge (where the river slows and sets out across the plains) holds one of the best claims. But even here, Bob Hartzman, with the municipal water department, worries that their river water will soon be cut off.

BH CALLED OUT
Our water rights have never been called out. And that just goes to show you how much things have changed over the last 100 years.

When the does come, it’ll be from 50 miles downstream near Avondale, Colorado, where agriculture rules.
AMB
KAAA-BAAAAAH! You see cows that are starting to trot and run towards us?

>>Dan Henrichs, standing here in a faded cowboy hat and a freshly-won rodeo belt buckle, runs longhorn cattle out here on the wide-open plains just east of the Rockies. It’s desert-dry normally, and this year’s been doubly arid, and brutally hot. Pale brown, sun-broiled scrubland surrounds this valley. Yet this pasture is green. Fields of thirsty watermelon and corn flourish a few miles away. All thanks to the river.

DH CONFLUENCE
DOOR SLAMS We are standing at the confluence of the head gates of the Highline Canal and the Arkansas River….
>>Here, most of what’s left of the Arkansas River, spills into rusty steel gates, and pours straight down a deep, grass-lined straight canal. The Highline holds a very old claim, and is still running strong. But most irrigation canals are dry, leaving miles and miles of crops to wither.
DM dead
This corn right here is dead. And you can see by the cracks in the ground, how dry it is.

>>Travel 100 miles east on the river and you’ll find Dale Mauch, who runs a big farming and cattle operation on the scorched plains of Lamar, Colorado. The canal that four generations of his family have relied on for irrigation, dried up last month.
DM 152
The Fort Lyon Canal is a canal that started in 1860.
This is the first time that we went to zero before the 4th of July. That’s just something that’s just, in 152 years has never happened.

>>Mauch will salvage much of his corn crop, chopping it up for cattle feed, but he says the drought exposes the fragility of his lifestyle and livelihood.

DM DAYS NUMBERED
My water comes from 200 miles away on top of a mountain down a dirt ditch to get to my farm. When water gets short that’s not very economical. And so, the guy irrigating out of the Arkansas River, his days are numbered.

On east another 35 miles downstream and the Arkansas River crosses into Kansas where it is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.

AMB UNDER BRIDGE
Standing down here just south of Lakin, Kansas, under a bridge that purports to span the Arkansas River, however there’s no down river here, not even a hint of water. Just dry sand stretching for miles. There’s a rotting deer carcass… couple of guys shooting guns.

AMB SHOOTING GUNS

JB DEPRESSING
--Gunshot—“Does it ever seem kind of, I mean, depressing, that there’s no water in this river?” Sometimes. It’d be nice to come down and play in it… when it’s hot.
It’s hot today… shhh, yeah”

There’s no relief from the heat in western Kansas, and that’s especially true for ranchland on south, and east of Lakin.

NP INTRO
My name is Nathan Pike, and we’re located 10 miles south of Minneola, in the grass country.

Ranch life seems to agree with Pike. He’s rough and spry, despite a host of maladies and serious injuries over his 78 years. He has lived --and raised cattle—on the squinty, low hills here… since the Dust Bowl.

NP BORN IN A DROUGHT
Well, I was born in a drought, and I’ve seen several. But this is probably the most damaging one I’ve seen.
I’ve never seen buffalo grass die. And it has.

The empty, rolling prairie stretches miles in all directions from a rise on Pike’s ranch, where he kneels to touch a sea of stubby, burnt, grass, dried, almost to the shade of his straw cowboy hat.

DESCRIPTION
You can see what we’re up against, this old stuff is no good at all, and we’re in a fire hazard. We had a prairie fire a week ago yesterday, just two miles south of here, and it got up with in a half a mile of us.

Pike had to sell off the bulk of his cattle. He’s got fewer now than any time in the last 50 years. And since he sold, cattle prices have gone up. As for what this means his future, for rebuilding his family cattle operation…

NP RAIN
We don’t know. We got to get some rain (laughing) that’s what we gotta get.

But there’s none in the forecast. Just parching triple digit highs, as the worst drought in memory along the Arkansas River Basin deepens and intensifies.
FM, HPM